


Red Phosphorus

by scioscribe



Category: 221B Baker Towers
Genre: Bloodplay, Break Up, Complicated Relationships, Knifeplay, M/M, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-26 22:06:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17149937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: They have their own history.





	Red Phosphorus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [keerawa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keerawa/gifts).



‘Call us a perfect collision, man _,’_ Moriarty had whispered once across the flat pillow they’d been sharing.  ‘Call us petrol and a fucking lucifer.  Nobody’s seen our like together in a hundred years.’

Narrow bed, ancient mattress with the ticking spilling out from a gash.  Moriarty in the dark talking about lucifer matches, tipped with white phosphorus; how you could light one just by popping it against your thumbnail, how the girls who made them died because their jaws rotted off their faces.

‘Slow poison, bruv.’  There was a throb of admiration in his voice.  ‘But the factories went on making them, innit.  For a long, long time.’

Moriarty liked history.  He taught it to Sherlock, not gently, digging answers and opinions out of him while he dragged his light little penknife across Sherlock’s skin, nicking him when he got things wrong, when he got stupid, when he got boring; Sherlock got Moriarty’s mouth on him when he was doing well.  Not on his cock, not until they were done, but on the little cuts, his tongue hotter than the blood.

History, Moriarty said, was like maths, if you could work it right, and he could work it right.

He finessed it into coughing up the rules of empire.  He built his own, built it out of coke and spice and heroin and pills, the bad and the weak-willed and the needy; he kept it invisible.  Coppers would never touch him—would never even find him.

No one would or did.  No one but fifteen-year-old Sherlock standing there in his fresh-brushed jacket and the trainers that had cost him bare.  _Their_ history:

The creps were the first thing Moriarty had really asked him about, after he got done quizzing Sherlock about how Sherlock had tracked him.

‘Them trainers, they’re new,’ Moriarty said.  ‘Did you buy them or blag them?’

‘Bought.’  He was dexterous—he could get out of the shops with anything small enough to pocket—but trainers were too bulky; blagging them was too risky.

‘For today?  What, you figure this for a business meeting?  You dress to impress, fam?’

‘If you ain’t impressed enough I found you, if we can’t do business off it, creps won’t do the job.’  He lifted his chin, letting Moriarty’s gaze linger on him.  ‘They’re still for you, though.  Because I got something else about you figured out.  So I wanted to look proper.’

Sherlock knew what Moriarty saw—a boy on the cusp of being a man, soft enough that tipping him over into who he’d be could also mean shaping him to who Moriarty would want.  A choice morsel.  Dark brown skin, so smooth he looked precision-moulded; rangy, taller than Jamie Moriarty himself, and with bigger hands.  And in banging trainers, too, making a good show of himself.

Moriarty—smiling now, savouring him—was well fit too.  He hair was buzzed short, begging for a hand to be run across it.  He wore glasses with thick black plastic frames; they gave him a professorial air.

They slipped down his nose when they were in bed, but they never quite fell off.

Sherlock had expected to get buggered—had made a play for it—but he hadn’t expected to like it so much.  He hadn’t expected to _want_.

After that first time, Moriarty said, ‘I’ve done ’nuff mischief in my life, but having you’s the first crime I’m dead willing to pay for.  You’d be worth it.’  He was lying on his stomach smoking Sobranies, leaving a rainbow of pastel butts in the ashtray by the bed; he’d peeled the warning off the box and then stuck part of it to Sherlock’s bare skin, giving him the word KILLS in black-and-white across his hip.  ‘And what’s more,’ he said, ‘you know it.  Little swot.’

Moriarty bought Sherlock whatever he wanted, right down to the private tutor who taught him to jailbreak all the troubles in his head, the broken concentration and the sudden pivots in his temper.  He took him places, for work and for play.  Sherlock had been fucked on some of the finest beds in some of the finest hotels in the world—for play—and in some of the cheapest and most louse-ridden—for work.  He would always remembering Moriarty sucking him off, taking his time, while Sherlock watched an enormous waterbug crawl up the split wallpaper; it had drawn the whole thing out until his eventual climax had hit him with the force of a gunshot.  Work—waste places and waste people.  Until those hotels started getting nice too, not because Moriarty was enjoying himself but because the confabs demanded it, because he was talking to a different class of people.

Sherlock couldn’t stop thinking about the little spider embossed on the blade of Moriarty’s knife, always just above the cut, just above the blood.  Watching.

Because the only pleasure Moriarty spent money on was Sherlock himself.  Aside from that, aside from those presents and holidays, the man lived like he was perpetually skint.  That one narrow bed.  All the cash was going somewhere else.

He spent out—out and out and out—further and further.  Just a couple years ago, he’d been a local concern, London’s own petty Napoleon, but now he was so much bigger than that.  He was buying things Sherlock couldn’t see or touch.  People.  Futures.

He was going to become another emperor.  He’d own it all in the end.  Maybe his name wouldn’t show anywhere, but he’d have his claim all the same.

KILLS.

So much for London, then, but what did it matter?  What was so brilliant about the way things were?

Better the devil you knew, Sherlock could have said, but at this point, he knew Moriarty better than anything else in the world, knew the way the tendons in his arms twitched when he was stressed, the length of his eyelashes, the taste of his come, the mazey workings of his mind.  Moriarty _was_ his own personal devil, hot-skinned, convenient, a slow and beloved poison.  He knew fuck-all about the world in comparison to that.  He needed more evidence.

So he was going.  Call it work.

Moriarty wasn’t surprised by it—Sherlock had surprised him only once, at the very beginning.  Once he’d known Sherlock existed at all, he’d watched his boy too closely for Sherlock to give him any shocks.  And Sherlock knew he’d yielded more to Moriarty than he’d ever meant to.  He’d counted only on the way their minds had ratcheted together, gear-teeth fitting perfectly, and on lust; he hadn’t guessed there’d be anything more than that.  The narrow, intense strip of his soul had had a match struck off it.  Moriarty had made him what he was, so of course Moriarty knew what he’d do.  Sherlock was a fool for him—but not enough of one to stay.

Moriarty knew all that too, but he let Sherlock tell it to him anyway; he just stood there calmly—or at least still—his eyes as glassy and unreadable as marbles.  ‘So you’re off because I’ve got ambitions.  What, you don’t think I’ll manage them?  You don’t take mine for the winning side, is that it?’

‘No,’ Sherlock said.  ‘I’m off because I think you’ll do it if I’m here to help you.  Maybe not, if I’m not.’

‘So you noticed, then,’ Moriarty said.  He leaned back against the wall.  ‘I went so far as to graph it—what I did before you, quantified, and what I did after.  You wouldn’t believe that fucking spike, right up like a rocket.  You think it’ll stop if you go?  I got news for you—your methods are mine now, bruv, your _mind’s_ mine, you’re the little voice in my head.  That don’t stop just with you leaving.  That don’t stop ever.  You and me, Sherlock, we’re forever.’

Sherlock nodded.  He had a keen instinct for the impossible—he knew he could never leave Moriarty completely behind him.  If they were each other’s past, they’d go on being each other’s future, too.  Always.

But the present—the present was more of an open question.

‘Yeah,’ Sherlock said.  ‘I’ll be seeing you.’

Moriarty smiled a hard and sharkish smile; he smiled so widely that it would have been impossible for anyone else to see that he was gutted.  ‘That’s a fine crusade you got there.  Sherlock Holmes, off to solve the state like it’s a puzzle.’  He kissed Sherlock briefly.  He tasted like smoke.  ‘You find me sometime, bruv.  You ever make me come looking for you, I don’t think that’s gonna be a good day.’

*

The first murder Sherlock solved after he broke with Moriarty was an intimate little husband-and-wife affair.  No loose strings.  He got stiffed on the payment; the copper said he was lucky not to be arrested himself.

He waited for the next thing, lighting match after match in the dark, letting them burn themselves out in the empty bin.  They used red phosphorus for matchheads now: it was safer.  He watched the little licks of flame burn down to nothing.

 


End file.
